Fahrenheit 451 | #1 Best Books in Fiction | Most Popular Book in 2024

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury | 60^th Anniversary Edition

Montag is a fireman. His job is not to put out fires, as firemen did many years earlier, but to start them. Specifically, to hunt out houses with hidden libraries of books, and to set them on fire. This is the future of the USA where books are forbidden, because they encourage people to think, and such thinking destabilizes the status quo.
Television reality shows are encouraged instead. Montag doesn't think about his job, until he encounters Clare, a mysterious woman who asks him why he is doing what he is doing. He starts wondering. He grabs a few books from a cache that should have been burned and starts reading them. Her can't make sense of them. He encounters a man who helps him to read and appreciate books. But his wife, scared of the authorities, sells him, out. He ends up on the run. He finds the people who live in hiding.

Their task is to commit books to memory so that they can be preserved. It's too dangerous to keep books around, but one can memorize them and pass them on to others.